Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has got himself a lot of attention (333 Google News entries as I write) by giving an interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos predicting worse unemployment data - and offering no solution:

Greenspan told the ABC program “This Week” that …a “pretty awful” September employment report released Friday showed the jobless rate continued to climb.
A slowing or halt in job losses is different from reversing the rise in unemployment, Greenspan noted, adding that the nation’s unemployment rate — currently 9.8 percent — is “going to penetrate the 10 percent barrier before heading down.”… However, Greenspan said it was too soon to consider another economic stimulus package or other major spending plan

Greenspan predicts economic growth to hit 3 percent or higher CNNPolitics.com October 4, 2009

The blog Old Atlantic Lighthouse, however, does have a solution: To Greenspan: stop immigration is the answer

“Greenspan: But remember that unless there is a monthly increase of more than 100,000 a month, you’ve still got the unemployment rate continuing to rise”.
Greenspan sees unemployment going up. But he still advocates continued legal immigration. That’s why the unemployment rate rises if 50,000 jobs are created a month, plus fertility of Hispanics already here.

OAL then presents one of its trademark briefing books demonstrating that Greenspan has always been dogmatically pro open borders - and hypothesizes as to why.

One does not have to accept all of this to agree that Old Atlantic Lighthouse is in the first instance quite right: in the midst of the biggest slump in employment since the Depression, why isn’t the pace of immigration being mentioned?
Why not a moratorium?

The Irish Savant has been in Stockholm, producing a couple of very depressing blogs.

I’ve been here nearly two weeks. After a day or two I began to take count of the couples that I saw. I divided them into Swede with Swede, Swede with cultural enricher, and where both were cultural enrichers…
I’m not claiming that the figures meet normal statistical sampling standards, but equally when a consistent pattern emerges, day after day, it must mean something.

In all I counted 214 couples. Here’s the breakdown:

132 Swede/Swede

24 Both cultural enrichers or else not possible to say

58 Swede/cultural enricher

So there you have it. More than one in four of such liaisons feature a Swede and a cultural enricher. This, looking at it coldly and mathematically, means the death of the Swedish people as we know it. But we realised this anyway…

But he was distracted from this pleasant pastime by reading The Recession’s Racial Divide By BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEDRICK MUHAMMAD The New York Times September 12, 2009 - about which he has produced a devastating critique (Sociologists need their lab rats Saturday 19 September 2009):

You can see what’s coming, of course.

Blacks are ‘taking the brunt of the recession’ apparently…Could this be due to the millions of illegal Latino immigrants taking their jobs and working at dirt-level pay?

Apparently not. These possible factors are not mentioned at all, in fact.

Could it be due to the well-documented failings of the black community, poor work ethic, low IQ, high predisposition to criminality, unstable family environment?

No, these are not mentioned either. So what’s the cause. It’s simple. Racism (on the part of whites, I need hardly add).

Leftist bigot Ehrenreich, of course, has been an MSM favorite for years (a couple of left blogs are having ecstasies about this latest piece). But she was born in 1941 and it shows.

As The Irish Savant demonstrates, she is quite unable to grasp the Minority Mortgage Meltdown:

…she moves on to the sub-prime bust. She explains how, for generations, and ‘thanks to a legacy of discrimination’, ‘solid black citizens’ were denied house loans by mortgage lenders.

Why? Could it have been their well-documented lousy credit ratings? No. This factor was not mentioned.

The real explanation then? More racism.

But there is a problem

…as I read on, I must confess, I get hopelessly confused. Because, just before the sub-prime bust, it seems that those same mortgage lenders, by some mysterious and unexplained mechanism, have turned around 180 degrees…they’re now actually seeking out those very same ‘solid black citizens’ to offer them all the money they want to buy houses!

Isn’t that remarkable? And isn’t it wonderful? Barbara must have been thrilled.

But no – apparently not. It seems that these lenders were greedy unscrupulous capitalist pigs, ‘forcing’ loans on confused and vulnerable people, after which they ran cackling all the way to the bank

TIS concludes:

If the greedy capitalists are only interested in grabbing all the money they can (and I agree with her on that one) why did they pass up all those wonderful opportunities with the ‘solid black citizens’ over all these years?

Alas, she doesn’t explain.

Ok, the foregoing has been facetious, so let’s get serious for a minute. In the name of Jesus, how can we expect to solve what is a serious problem if we resolutely avert our gaze from the real causes?

(“Jesus!” That’s Hate Speech! Wicked Irish Savant!)

Of course, as VDARE.com has repeatedly demonstrated, mass immigration in the past generation has been far and away the worst economic problem experienced by blacks and working people generally. And the trigger for the mortgage crisis was not banking avarice (always present, otherwise they wouldn’t be working at all). It was the foolish actions by the Clinton and Bush administrations to encourage lenders to lower standards and foist complicated financial schemes on people who lacked the capability to understand them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is in a time warp. America is not a gritty but white labor town like Butte MT, where she was born. Neither is it a pre-affirmative action liberal arts college, where no doubt she began her assimilation into this world view.

Peter Brimelow likes to say America will not deal with its modern problems before the generation which became young adults before the 1965 Immigration disaster became obvious has left the scene.

But they could try thinking. Tell Barbara Ehrenreich to stop humming The Ballard of Joe Hill and get up to date. Ask Dedrick Muhammad if he contributed anything to this obsolete nonsense beyond his color

Charles Bloch’s article about Human Events distancing itself from Pat Buchanan’s recent column “Did Hitler Really Want War?” picks away at the sore that blights the American Right: the modern “conservative” establishment–what has been called “Conservatism, Inc.”.

The growing menace of political correctness, and increasing political persecution from the intolerant radical Left, such as the $PLC, reveals the spinelessness of Conservatism, Inc. in defending historically core positions of the political Right.

The fact that all too many conservative careerists require backbone replacement surgery has allowed the political adversaries of the Right to gain the moral high ground in terms of what is acceptable and off-limits from civil discourse.

As a fixture on the Washington political scene, Human Events and other editors and owners of “conservative” publications (including “conservative” pundits and columnists, such as the late Robert Novak) tread carefully around “controversies” that can run afoul of the “PC” police. They crave political access — accessibility to political insiders on Capital Hill and various executive department offices — and accessibility requires acceptance. Anything that jeopardizes this fragile arrangement must go. Principled viewpoints are all too easily smeared as politically incorrect. Hosting parties for congressional candidates, politicians, committee chairmen, and key staff members and journalists from the MSM are more important than speaking candidly about politically inconvenient truths.

Pat Buchanan is one of the few remaining exceptions to this trend. He believes in speaking freely in a “free” society and letting the chips fall where they may.

The real irony is that Buchanan’s recent column would have fit right in with the pro-isolationist views of the founding editors of Human Events (Felix Morley and Frank Chodorov). The America

(more…)

President Obama (who likely first met Edward Kennedy only five years ago when he was ordained Senator from Illinois) has earned this headline from Reuters:

Obama lauds Kennedy as voice of poor and powerless
Sat Aug 29, 2009 12:44pm

The VDARE.com response of course is “poor and powerless of which nationality”? Kennedy’s sponsorship of, and unrepentant attempts to expand the 1965 Immigration Act disaster has been an unmitigated catastrophe for the American Working class – particularly Blacks – in terms of income and quality of life. It has to some extent benefited Plutocrats like Kennedy and the upper class generally.

Counterpunch’s Alexander Coburn, from the Left, puts forward an interesting hypothesis:

Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion CounterPunch Diary
Weekend Edition August 28-30, 2009

Though the obituarists have glowingly evoked Kennedy’s 46-year stint in the US Senate and, as ‘the last liberal’, his mastery of the legislative process, they miss the all-important fact that it was out of Kennedy’s Senate office that came two momentous slabs of legislation that signalled the onset of the neo-liberal era: deregulation of trucking and aviation. They were a disaster for organized labor and the working conditions and pay of people in those industries.

The theorists of deregulation were Stephen Breyer who was Kennedy’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Alfred Kahn, out of Cornell…

Did Kennedy fight, might and main, against NAFTA? No. As Steve Early relates in his piece on this site today, he was for it and helped Clinton ratify the job-losing Agreement…

The deadly attacks on the working class and on organized labor are Ted Kennedy’s true monument. But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby he was adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side.

Cockburn spectacularly fails to mention the far more consequential 1965 Act, possibly a testament to the extreme emotionalism of the liberal open-borders lobby, but to his credit he does note:

And it was Kennedy who was the prime force behind the Hate Crimes Bill, aka the Matthew Shepard Act, by dint of which America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. “Hate speech,” far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment going the way of the dodo.

No doubt, like AntiWar.com (and us) he feels the chilling shadow.

Cockburn concludes:

To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam…that Bobby…was really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, even though he helped deliver them into the inferno of neoliberalism.

So who was Kennedy working for in his recent decades in the Senate? “NeoLiberals”? We will have to give that some thought.

Ted Kennedy’s death on Wednesday–in essence the passing of a senator–produced a never-ending tsunami of retrospectives. Newscasts, from CNN to PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, devoted entire programs to Ted Kennedy’s passing. The funeral on Saturday is likely to trigger another wave of retrospectives by the MSM.

The enshrinement of the deceased exposes the unfiltered liberal biases of the Mainstream Media elite. On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, the gestures of John King and Gloria Borger–tilting the head, raising the eyebrows, batting the eyelashes–reflected a typical display of awestruck sentiment. Historian Douglas Brinkley summarized Kennedy’s legacy as if his political contributions ranked with the Founding Fathers.

Thursday’s Washington Post contains three front-page articles, four columns on the op/ed page (with six mini-retrospectives), a timeline with photographs that stretch across the span of two pages, five pages in the national section, and a “Style section” piece by Lois Romano. Friday’s Post contains two front page articles, multiple pages of coverage in the national section, and another column on the op/ed page.

The coverage is what one would expect from the death of a former president. Why all the attention over the death of this U.S. senator?

Part of the explanation is the Kennedy mystique–the death of the last prince of “Camelot”. Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted that Kennedy was “a prince fated never to be king”.

Another major factor is that Kennedy epitomized everything the MSM embraces: unrestricted mass immigration; “civil rights” also known as quotas, preferential treatment, and set-asides; public school desegregation via forced busing; the Equal Rights Amendment; socialized medicine (or “universal health care” widely touted as the “public option”); and Barack Obama.

MSM journalists, editors, reporters, and commentators identify with Kennedy’s political and social outlook–one defined by a rabid egalitarian liberal ideology.

Commentators on the airwaves talked in generic terms about how Kennedy “changed America” and left his “impact” on the nation without explaining the ramifications of his impact. Will the America of the future look like the America of the past? Will it resemble more and more the turmoil and ethnic strife of a Third World nation? How much public debt, how much more government, how much more federal regulation, how many more quotas, how many more egalitarian social policies are we willing to finance, support and shoulder as a nation? These questions will remain unanswered because the MSM will avoid any substantive critique or sustained discussion of Kennedy’s real legacy.

It should be noted that Editor & Publisher magazine combed though the obituaries of Sen. Kennedy to see how long it took for them to bring up the Chappaquiddick incident.

Here are the top results:

• Boston Herald — 10th paragraph

• Boston Globe — 5th paragraph

• New York Times —14th paragraph

• New York Post — 14th paragraph

• New York Daily News —13th paragraph

• Washington Post — 9th paragraph

• Wall Street Journal — 6th paragraph

• Los Angeles Times — 12th paragraph

• Chicago Tribune — 12th paragraph

• Miami Herald — 10th paragraph

• Reuters —18th paragraph

• USA Today —19th paragraph

• Politico–24th paragraph

• The Hill — NO MENTION

• Roll Call — 25th paragraph

• National Journal — 11th paragraph

• Times of London — 8th paragraph

Ellison Lodge has just published on Takimag a very elegant essay, The White People Party: The GOP and Demographic Destiny, arguing that the only practical option for the GOP is to mobilize its white base, noting the “Electing A New People” National Review cover story that Edwin S. Rubenstein and I did back in 1997, just before Buckley’s purge of immigration patriots. At VDARE.COM , we call this option “the Sailer Strategy“. (Steve’s update is now scheduled for after Labor Day–promise!)

Lodge also makes this very interesting point:

Of course what’s good for the GOP is not necessarily good for America. The Southern Strategy succeeded in electing Republicans, but they didn’t even bother trying to do anything about immigration or quotas. Richard Nixon won by appropriating the language of George Wallace, but went on to increase the Civil Rights department’s budget by 800 percent, institute the Philadelphia Plan for quotas, and a host of other left-wing racial policies. Reagan signed the 1986 amnesty bill. Bush I won with the Willie Horton ad, but went on to extend quotas with the renewed Civil Rights Act. In addition to his constant push for amnesty, Bush II encouraged the Supreme Court to uphold racial preferences in the Gratz and Grutter cases.

It seems to me that professional politicians quite often don’t know why they are elected or what their elections mean. I remember watching New Gingrich fiercely denouncing the late Robert Novak, at a Washington dinner after the GOP took Congress in 1994, because Novak had reported, entirely accurately as it turned out, that the GOP leadership had decided to do nothing about Affirmative Action.

Gingrich said he couldn’t use this supreme wedge issue because it would upset black Republicans (all two of them) and also suburban soccer moms, on whom he intended to build a permanent majority party.

Yeah.

Wonder if he regrets that now–wherever he is.

As far as I can make out, no Conservative leader has had the courage or brains to dissent in the MSM from the tidal wave of drivel being poured out about Senator Edward Kennedy. Orrin Hatch has made a fool of himself - again.

So, as so often nowadays, the task of being serious devolves to the Blogosphere. Old Atlantic Lighthouse has risen to the challenge.

Ted Kennedy legacy median wages same 1973 August 26, 2009
is another of OAL’s trademark briefing books. This one deals with Kennedy’s historical significance:

Kennedy’s legacy is 3rd world immigration that is bankrupting the country. He destroyed the greatest country that ever was. But he had many helpers…

Ted Sorensen ghost wrote Nation of Immigrants for Jack Kennedy. But it fed into their Irish Catholic resentment of Wasps. Their revenge are the above statistics. Obama has the same revenge need. Medicare, Social Security, safe communities all are being lost to immigration. That immigration comes from envy, resentment and hate. Same with affirmative action.

(We at VDARE.com are so accustomed to furiously patriotic Catholics, who could easily man the site with no other help, that it is useful to remember the alternative reaction exists.)

A usual, Old Atlantic Lighthouse’s portfolio of links would adequately equip any Patriot to handle public discussion of this disastrous man

Included is an incisive essay from the British National Party’s website:
America’s Greatest Traitor Dies by BNP News August 26,2009

Modern America’s greatest traitor, Edward Kennedy, has died, after nearly destroying European America. He leaves behind a scandalous political career which was laced with lurid tales of drugs, sexual abuse and moral degeneracy

Which is a very well informed discussion of Kennedy’s

attempts to utterly destroy the country of his birth.

As I said this morning, this lie about the 1965 Immigration Act should be his epitaph:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same… Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset…. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia….

In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.”

Death is no excuse.

The blog Old Atlantic Lighthouse has no more use for the late Robert Novak than did VDARE’s Kevin Lamb, without perhaps, the same disillusioning personal experiences. nation of immigrants Robert Novak called us xenophobic demagogues August 18, 2009 is a piece in OAL’s trademark style, a briefing book or portfolio of links, considering the later Novak in the context of the recent times. It is very effective.

The pivotal link is to Novak’s column The GOP’s Battle on the Border The Washington Post. Thursday, May 24, 2007. This was indeed a very crude denunciation of Republican restrictionists on the traditional ethnocentric grounds of “My-grandparents-from-Russia-were-good-for-this country-so-all-immigration-is-good”

This nation of immigrants has greeted successive waves of newcomers with apprehension stoked by demagogues. It has overcome such past xenophobic impulses. But that will be more difficult in an era of Internet bloggers and radio talkers

Old Atlantic Lighthouse then lays out the heads of objection to Novak’s ignorant assertion - which gave no sign of awareness of the 1924 cut-off - including

Income inequality is an upright U …It was high during immigration prior to 1924, it fell to a low by the 1960’s, and then rose again to the highest ever today.
See chart below from Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/

and a couple of his own essays, one of which is Novak and nativism September 08 2006. This is a response to Novak’s September 4 2006 column Immigration inaction may topple GOP

Novak laments that the GOP’s failure to get on board and pass some variation of the president’s amnesty plan will ‘divide’ the party and ‘topple the GOP.’
Well, cry me a river, Novak. I am more worried that the GOP, under the deranged leadership of open borders pimps, cheap labor enablers, and globalists, will topple the Republic.
Now which is more important, the Republic, or the Republican party? I know what my answer is, and I would bet I also know what Novak’s answer would be.

OAL concludes (with a well-judged passing thump at “Freeperism”

Freepers are useful idiots of the Left

):

On real issues that mattered such as immigration restriction, Novak used his position as a seeming conservative to shut down whites from stopping immigration. Novak was a neocon from the beginning. This spirit has captured the Republican party…They have Buckley Disease.

If a Neoconservative, Novak was an unusual one of course, Jewish by birth but Roman Catholic by conversion, whose disapproval of GWB’s Iraq venture earned him a prominent place in David Frum’s celebrated “Unpatriotic Conservative” denunciation. In later years, Novak resorted to the low-rent subterfuge of blaming his clashes with Zionists on his long-time partner, Rowland Evans. As the JTA News Service reports:

In his 2008 autobiography, “The Prince of Darkness,” Novak credited Evans with reporting and writing their columns that criticized Israel.
“But,” he quickly added, “my name appeared on every one of them and I agreed with my partner. The issue was just not on the top of my priority list, then or now.”
When he did return to the subject in the years following Evans’ retirement and subsequent death, Novak did so most often because of his concerns over the fate of Palestinian Christians.

Robert Novak: Feared political columnist, harsh critic of Israel
By Ron Kampeas • August 18, 2009
JTA smugly adds

Several times in his autobiography, Novak wrote about what he described as the efforts of pro-Israel critics to get newspapers to drop his and Evans’ syndicated column. Novak claimed that shortly after being told by the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger in 1975 that advertisers were complaining about Evans and Novak’s “anti-Israel” reporting, the newspaper dropped their syndicated column.
“It was one of about a hundred newspapers that we lost in a surprisingly short period of time,” Novak wrote. “Whatever the reason — and I had my suspicions — we never built back our base.”

One could see Novak as an example of Peter Brimelow’s frequently-repeated concept that political minds formed in the generation after WW2, in the era of the Cold War and a semi-socialized economy, simply cannot adapt to the problems of another era, of which nation-shattering immigration is primary. We have to wait for them to die off.

It is refreshing to read Ken Tomlinson’s informative and affectionate obituary Bob Novak, a Giant of Journalism Human Events 08/18/08 and be reminded that in that bygone era, Novak did make a contribution

Few journalists have ever affected this nation like Bob Novak. Take the Evans-Novak column that ran under the title “the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine” in the early spring of 1976…

State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt had told a London gathering of American ambassadors that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was actually necessary for world peace. In fact, Poland was a good example of the benefits of Soviet control because that had enabled the Poles to overcome their “romantic” political instincts which had led to so many “disasters in their past.”

Henry Kissinger’s right-hand man was confirming that détente was code for Communist victory over freedom. Within days, candidate Ronald Reagan who was challenging President Ford in Republican primaries, declared the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine meant “slaves should accept their fate.”…

Ford …in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter…still defensive over the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine…stubbornly insisted that the Polish people were free. The election was over

(Sonnenfeldt, a refugee from inter-war Germany, was of course following his ethnic predilections.)

Did Novak thus cause Reagan?!!!

Also, it is pleasant to find that Novak did have taste:

One day in the mid-70s after he had spent an evening with William F. Buckley, Jr. and friends at the Buckleys’ townhouse in Manhattan, Novak complained how boring the evening had been. “All they talked about was harpsichords,” he said.

Peter Brimlow would agree.

VDARE.com has long held the view that it is a settled MSM strategy to clog the minimal space they permit for discussion of Republican/Conservative matters with ineffectual RINOs or worse, to prevent more effective men getting attention. They have actually created a market demand for this kind of garbage.

What other possible explanation can there be for the 837 Google news stories currently reported on Colin Powell’s renewed “Face the Nation” backstabbing of the Party which foolishly rescued him from a botched military career and showered offices and honors on him for 20 years - only to be rewarded by a viciously anti-party endorsement of Obama last year, when no more goodies looked immediately likely?

Why would any Republican – much less a conservative – be interested in what this dishonorable clown has to say?

Let it be remembered that for every prize thrust on Powell, some better qualified white man went unrewarded and the country consequently underserved. It is a zero sum game at the top – and in fact, a long way below the top.

The only and best hope for the GOP is for it to recognize what it is – the White American’s party. The Democrats know who they are -the Colored/Jewish Party. Look at Obama’s appointments.

By the end of Obama’s first term, even MSM efforts will be futile: America will have got the message. This is the last thing the MSM wants. No wonder they keep frantically exhuming Colin Powell.

Well said, Old Atlantic Lighthouse

Of the several Immigration discussions on the weekend talk shows, the most violent (and hence the most realistic) was at Meet the Press, where Pat Buchanan faced Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill). The Politico website says

Food Fight!: The usually-staid “Meet the Press” on NBC turned into a smackdown Sunday…And it wasn’t pretty. There were interruptions, sighs and tense body language…none of the [other] exchanges got as heated as the one between Buchanan and Gutierrez.

(Immigration debate- turned-TV smackdown By Carrie Budoff June 24 2007)

Gutierrez (whose handsome F- ranking from Americans for Better Immigration is definitive) spent the program emitting a high pitched ethnocentric screech of rage. Of course these aging and decrepit Anglos should move over and give his strong and virile people everything they want! Any other idea was impermissible!

the tone and the texture of the debate that Pat has brought here to MEET THE PRESS is really what is wrong with this debate.

Pat Buchanan, of course, is eminently capable of defending himself - and actually knows the issue. (Old Atlantic Lighthouse, which headlined Pat Buchanan KOs Luis Gutierrez provides a useful statistical brief supporting the points Pat made.)

But the Guttierrez performance was illuminating. Clearly emboldened when his tantrum was not answered by Buchanan with another, he began to threaten:

Republicans are going to become a party of the past and irrelevant in national elections… and in the Congress of the United States…if we don’t change the texture and the tone of this debate and stop blaming immigrants… …and specifically Latinos for every ill that exists in this society.

And not satisfied with bullying the GOP, he went on to try intimidating American workers

We have the largest—the largest guest worker program in the history of the United States. It’s called 12 million undocumented workers. I want them to stop reducing wages of American workers…You know what they do because of their undocumented status? They actually do compete in the work space unfairly, damaging American workers. So if we’re not going to deport them…then we need to legalize them

(Of course, since Guttierrez opposes effective border controls, this simply makes room for more illegals.)

There was a time when immigration enthusiasts were more discreet. As Old Atlantic Lighthouse sourly notes:

Buchanan had the facts on what immigration is doing to Americans. Gutierrez made it clear, it was intentional.

Immigration has killed wage progress.

Americans need to consider Guttierrez. This is the ethnic particularist in full flight, viscerally incapable of considering any point of view but that of his clientele. Thanks, Ted Kennedy.

Tim Russert’s performance as Moderator was contemptible. In this section, he helped Gutierrez mount his attack. In the second, he allowed the assembled correspondents to skip off the issue and quickly get into Belt Way trivia. In an impressive example of Inside-the Beltway insularity, one, Roger Simon, actually denied there was an immigration crisis at all. (Email Roger Simon.)

Even the National Review has abandoned that strategem!